1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to printing systems in which a plurality of printers is caused to execute processing. For example, the present invention relates to a form printing system or the like.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a known type of printing system, an output form or the like that is created in advance is merged with data describing variable portions, and the resulting merged data is printed.
In the case of a large-scale form printing system or the like, printers at which form data is printed are located at sites (branch offices) throughout the country, and the number of printers is expected to be as large as several hundreds. In such a large-scale form printing system, it is difficult to manage all the printers by a single form storage server due to limitations of resources and performance of an operating system (hereinafter abbreviated as an OS). For example, in the case of Windows®, a printer object (logical printer) has to be created in order to register a printer as a print destination. Usually, in a print system of an OS, an environment in which several hundred printer objects are created is not anticipated, so that there is no guarantee that all the printer objects operate properly.
Thus, it has generally been the case to implement a system so that management of printers and print jobs is distributed to individual sites by providing print servers at individual sites, as described, for example, in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-290630.
However, when print servers are provided at individual sites as in the form printing system described above, cost increases as the number of servers increases.